Hopeful Woman: Transparent Red Vinyl LP

Label: Dear Life
Release Date: 6th March

A nourishing bowl of homely country folk, Natalie Jane Hill serves up song like the comfort of being with friends and family but enjoying the still, the safety and a sense of change in something that feels like a new familiar. 

For those who dig: Karen Dalton, Hayley Hendrickx, Ada Lea, The Waeather Station, Aldous Harding, Julia Byrne...

Natalie Jane Hill’s new record, Hopeful Woman, is composed of slender songs, life-sized, in which humans endeavor to reconcile themselves to wildernesses
and cities; rearrange their rooms and open windows to be closer to the world outside and its choruses of frogs and crickets; attempt and fail to reach one
another across a kitchen table; weather natural disaster. If something we might deign to call self-discovery emerges over the course of these narratives, it
owes in no small part to the scale of their scenes, to the modesty of their ambitions, in which tumult and adaptation and growth are metabolized through a
body’s gentle actions and reactions, its moments of quietude and observation and reflection. “Into the current of life I will fly,” Hill sings on Oranges, a song
that would serve her well as a mission statement. “Changing and loving and growing and trying.”
Hopeful Woman was recorded live in two parts: first in Lockhart, Texas —she’s a native of the state—and then in Western North Carolina, where she now
makes her home. She enlisted a small ensemble of collaborators whose spacious but focused arrangements hum with the nuance and delicacy that has
attended the recordings of another thoughtful Texas songwriter, the great Edith Frost. Hill’s crackerjack multi-instrumentalist partner Mat Davidson in
particular appears throughout with preternatural grace: attend to his aching pedal steel on “Never Left Me,” or demurely pastoral-psychedelic flute that
weaves through “Lucky to Be,” or the stacked fiddles on “Blue is the Color of My Sun.” All is in deft service to Hill’s magnificent voice, redolent of Hope
Sandoval or Karen Dalton but more humane, more sturdy, closer to the earth.
It’s only close to the earth where hope takes root and, we can only hope, grows—not in reckless, wild fecundity but in measured steps, one at a time, while the
storm gathers, rips through, passes. “And I know through time we’ll give and we’ll let go,” Hill sings. “And I know this time I’ll give and I’ll let go.” Hers is a wise
and humane hopefulness, built exquisitely to human scale. The same can be said of this record.
TRACKLISTING
Side A:
1. Rose and Pink
2. Never Left Me
3. Colors
4. Kitchen Table
5.Lady Pond
Side B:
6. Lucky To Be
7. Blue is the Color of My Sun
8. Oranges
9. Endless Memory
10. I Thought Love Meant